Dooo doo dooo doo DOOO doooooooo

There’s an adorably hokey voiceover by Mulder at the beginning of this thing that makes me a) nostalgic and b) afraid for the rest of the hour. Yes, it feels like a throwback, but if you want something arch and contemporary, I recommend BoJack Horseman.

The show cuts abruptly to a big, FX-heavy sequence set in 1947 Roswell with a really boss spaceship and a classic model big-eyes-and-forehead grey alien, and it feels like everything’s going to be all right.

Then the old title cards, completely unchanged from 1993, come up on the screen with that wonderful Mark Snow theme song, and it’s high school all over again.

Once we’re finally in the present and not getting caught up in the pregnancy subplot that kind of ruined the show’s final two seasons, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are doing basically what you’d think they’d be doing, which is to say that Mulder’s not doing much of anything and Scully is off being icy and competent as a doctor who calls her nurse “nurse” instead of, say, “Susan”.

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Then things get weird, and not in the prosthetics-and-corn-syrup way we were all hoping: Joel McHale, an actor I’ve loved for years, shows up as Tad O’Malley, a dead ringer (ideologically speaking) for somebody I can’t put my finger on. “Who is that guy he’s supposed to be?” I ask my wife. “The one from talk radio. You know, the idiot.”

“That’s a big question,” she says.

Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams

A few days before airdate for the first episode of Fox’s revival of the X-Files, which is for serious called My Struggle, it began to enter the public imagination that over the 14 years since the fondly remembered sci-fi series got canceled, we have all met people like special agent Fox Mulder, the heart-throbby conspiracy-wonk-cum-FBI-agent who rattles off pseudoscientific explanations for things like the chupacabra and the Jersey devil at the drop of a tinfoil hat, and those people are all the absolute freaking worst.

FFS SMDH IRL IMO (@bombsfall)

mulder: 9/11 scully: mulder... mulder: 9/11 wa- scully: stop mulder: 9/11wasaninsidejob scully: get out get out of the car

Chris Carter seems to realize that the Mulder of 2002 feels likely to age into a Donald Trump-loving bottom-feeder who tweets JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS in all caps.

Somewhat horrifyingly, Carter has leaned into that realization and models this episode’s enigmatic central guest star (McHale, doing his best, God bless him) on braying jackass Alex Jones, the syndicated radio host who, through his website Infowars, nurtures intellectually that class of people who think 9/11 was an inside job, the Sandy Hook primary school massacre and the Boston bombing were false flag operations, and Barack Obama is literally Satan. The McHale character, by stark contrast, believes at least one thing that is actually true.

The whole enterprise would be more entertaining if fewer people took Jones seriously, I guess. Carter made his bones on the original series with atmosphere, creepy practical effects and a lot of things you didn’t quite see; now he can’t be explicit enough fast enough. Mulder actually gets to see an alien spacecraft (albeit a mildly crummy one, visually speaking – the show appears to have blown its entire budget on the Roswell flashback) and late in the episode there’s a montage of everything from Fema to Monsanto.

Scully: the voice of reason, kind of

McHale’s character introduces Scully and Mulder to a young woman named Sveta (Annet Mahendru) who claims to have alien DNA; the plot, about baby-stealing, is part of the larger arc of the season, seems like (I’ve seen two episodes as of this writing. The second one is better). Sveta doesn’t last long and isn’t given much to do except look simultaneously frightened and pouty, and Tad O’Malley fades into the background, likely to return.

There’s a human conspiracy at work, Mulder decides. All the alien stuff in the last nine seasons and two movies was, of course, a smokescreen hiding the Real Truth: that America will soon be in the grip of a class of Elites, rather than by a class of people who use the word “elite” as a regular singular noun, which at present seems more likely.

“You can’t say these things,” Scully tells Mulder after his epiphany (by the way: Anderson is great here, even without this monologue to endear her to the embrained members of the audience). “It’s fearmongering claptrap isolationist techno-paranoia so bogus and dangerous and stupid that it borders on treason. Saying these things would be irresponsible.”

I have another reason Mulder, and people who think the dumb things Mulder thinks, should stay silent: equating news reports of government surveillance (which is real) with the theory that the Trilateral Commission secretly orchestrated 9/11 (which is not real) makes it harder for people who want to stop things like the expansion of the former to be taken seriously.

This is the problem – and it’s one, at least, that Carter acknowledges and is trying to address – with The X-Files in the information age. In various forms, much of the information he speculated about in the original series has made it on to the internet, sourced, verified and brought to light by enterprising news organizations (the Guardian gets a shout-out for our Snowden coverage in the show).

That information is often mixed with fairly heinous lies, and it’s less fun than it used to be to cross-pollinate the two in fiction, because so many people don’t seem to be able to tell them apart. The truth, in vital bits and crucial pieces, is already out there.

On the other hand

The Cancer Man shows up smoking through his tracheostomy in the stinger, so I’ll keep watching.

• Comments on this article have been reopened in line with the Australian air date.